The DevOps maturity model is not just a buzzword. This is a roadmap that your organization can use to adopt and optimize your DevOps practices progressively.
It basically guides your teams through various stages of growth, from basic automation and collaboration to full integration of advanced DevOps strategies.
If you strive for continuous improvement, the model will give you a clear path for optimizing operations teams and the development pipeline.
Adopting DevOps principles lets you streamline workflows, boost team productivity, and better align with business objectives.
Let’s see exactly how you can do that.
The DevOps maturity model is a structured framework that helps you:
That way, you can systematically shift from traditional, siloed IT operations to a more collaborative and automated environment, aligning development and operations teams.
Remember: The model’s arguably main advantage is that it encourages continuous learning and improvement. Your teams can build on their capabilities over time and achieve a competitive edge.
Besides, integrating advanced DevOps principles allows you to increase deployment frequency, improve software quality, and streamline the entire software development process.
One of our clients, Business Development Bank of Canada, achieved impressive results by optimizing its software delivery processes in three months. Using Axify led to a 51% faster delivery time and reduced time in pre-development by up to 74% and QA by up to 81%. BDC also saw a 24% increase in capacity and an annual recurring productivity gain of $700,000.
The main driver behind this result was striving for continuous improvement using DORA metrics and Value Stream Mapping.
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You can get similar results once you reach DevOps maturity. Let’s break down the benefits.
Achieving DevOps maturity gives you the flexibility to respond quickly to changing market demands. With streamlined DevOps practices, you can quickly adapt your development processes and adjust to new business goals to stay ahead of the competition.
As your DevOps processes mature, the ability to rapidly deploy new features and services becomes second nature. With continuous delivery and a more efficient deployment process, you can seize opportunities faster, bringing innovations to your customers and increasing your ability to deliver business value.
A mature DevOps approach ensures smooth and efficient application and infrastructure scaling. Automating manual processes and improving configuration management help you handle increasing demands without compromising performance, ensuring your systems are ready for growth.
Streamlined workflows and reduced costs are direct benefits of achieving higher maturity levels in DevOps. Automation and well-structured processes help your team minimize inefficiencies, improve collaboration, and enhance operational efficiency.
Mature DevOps practices entail continuous integration and improved delivery pipelines. One advantage is that you’ll have faster, more reliable code deployments, reducing your time-to-market for new features. As you release updates quickly and confidently, your users stay happy, and your business moves forward.
Reaching higher levels of DevOps maturity naturally leads to better software quality and a more seamless user experience. After all, you’ll integrate more code quality checks and automated security scans into your pipeline. That way, you can catch issues early and make sure your product meets high-quality standards every time.
DevOps maturity has five stages: initial, managed, defined, measured, and optimized. Each stage has a key focus and challenges that prevent you from reaching those goals.
At this stage, you’re most likely operating in a traditional IT environment, where siloed teams work independently, and there’s minimal automation. Collaboration between operations and development teams is rare, and processes are manual and inefficient. This results in slow delivery cycles, high failure rates, and a lack of agility when responding to changes.
However, you may rely on legacy systems and need help adapting to modern DevOps practices.
You introduce basic DevOps practices in this stage, focusing on initial automation and continuous integration. Teams start collaborating more effectively, with some cross-functional teams forming, but processes must be fully standardized. The goal is to establish agility and implement automation in repetitive tasks like testing and deployment.
By this point, your organization has achieved organization-wide adoption of DevOps. There are now defined processes for development and deployment, and continuous delivery is becoming the standard. Automation tools are used across the software development process, and DevOps capabilities are embedded into your teams' operations. Collaboration is no longer an exception but the norm, and your DevOps strategy is clearly outlined.
In the measured stage, you begin to actively monitor and measure the success of your DevOps processes using key performance indicators (KPIs). You track Agile metrics to ensure ongoing continuous improvement. With data-driven insights, you can spot inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas that need improvement.
DevOps is fully integrated into your organization’s culture at this final stage. You’ve achieved operational efficiency with a focus on continuous innovation. Automation is deeply embedded, and your team is empowered to experiment and scale as needed. Collaboration across the organization is seamless, and you’ve built a high-performing DevOps team that can handle both small and large-scale deployments effortlessly.
If you want to transition smoothly through all the DevOps maturity stages above, focus on the following issues.
Building a strong DevOps culture of collaboration is arguably the most essential mindset change, but the results are worth it. A collaborative culture leads to quicker problem-solving and more innovative solutions. To achieve that:
Automating repetitive tasks is a core part of achieving DevOps maturity because it improves operational efficiency and reduces human error. Automation also frees your team to focus on more value-added work, improving overall productivity.
Here’s what we advise:
Focus on automating tasks like continuous integration, testing, code review, and deployment. Automate security checks and configuration management to ensure that your processes are consistent, scalable, and easier to manage.
Structured processes help scale your DevOps efforts. Well-defined workflows ensure that everyone follows DevOps practices consistently across all stages of the software development lifecycle.
Make sure you establish process improvements that are constantly evolving based on feedback and metrics. This structured approach should cover everything from deployment pipelines to incident management, ensuring smooth and reliable software releases.
One of the most critical aspects of DevOps maturity is the ability to foster collaboration across teams. It’s important to create a common language between developers, operations, and business stakeholders and ensure that all parties are involved in key decisions around software delivery.
Sharing knowledge and insights is essential because it helps teams stay aligned and work toward a common goal. This collaboration improves team morale and the overall performance of your DevOps environment.
Measuring DevOps maturity involves tracking key performance indicators that show whether your DevOps practices are functioning well. These metrics help you understand where your team stands and identify areas for improvement.
Let’s examine some of the most important metrics for assessing DevOps maturity.
Deployment frequency measures how often your team successfully deploys code to production. High-performing teams deploy small, frequent updates rather than large, infrequent releases. Frequent code deployments reduce risk by minimizing the size of each change, allowing for faster fixes when issues arise.
Example: If your team deploys 10 times daily but struggles with post-deployment issues, this is an opportunity to refine automation and testing processes to ensure smoother releases.
The DORA metric Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) has changed its name to Time to Restore Service and, more recently, to Failed Deployment Recovery Time. Regardless of how you refer to it, this KPI measures how quickly your team can recover from a failure. A lower recovery time indicates that your team can quickly diagnose and resolve issues, leading to higher customer satisfaction and less disruption.
Tracking this KPI helps improve incident management and your DevOps environments' reliability.
Example: If your failed deployment recovery time is longer than expected, you might identify gaps in your configuration management or slow communication between teams to reduce downtime.
Lead time for changes measures the average time between the first commit made in the dev environment and when that feature is successfully running. This metric is crucial for understanding the efficiency of your development process. A shorter lead time means faster delivery of new features, bug fixes, and updates.
Example: If your lead time is extended, you may have issues with slow testing or manual processes. Automation tools can reduce this time by running tests and code reviews in parallel.
The change failure rate represents the percentage of deployments that result in a failure, such as a bug or outage. A low failure rate indicates high-quality code and reliable processes. Reducing this rate is critical to achieving a mature DevOps environment.
Example: If your change failure rate is high, improve test coverage and automate code reviews to catch bugs early in the pipeline.
As organizations progress through their DevOps maturity journey, security practices become deeply integrated into the software development process, leading to the emergence of DevSecOps.
Security is no longer a last-minute concern but is embedded in every development lifecycle stage. This shift ensures that security is addressed alongside code quality and operational efficiency, reducing the risk of security breaches.
Our platform has helped numerous organizations implement DevOps best practices. Our BDC case study shows how we support continuous improvement, collaboration, and optimization throughout the software development lifecycle.
Here are some features you can leverage to advance through the various stages of DevOps maturity:
As you can see, Axify provides an all-in-one solution for guiding your team through each stage of the DevOps maturity model.
Ready to optimize your DevOps maturity journey?
Book a demo today and see how Axify can help your team take the next step.
